Insurance (and Other) Woes With Multiple Sclerosis

It’s not the first time I’ve heard the stories and pleas of someone who is about to lose (or has already lost, or never had) health insurance. This past week a member of our community contacted me via our Life With MS Facebook page with her dilemma and I thought we could have a conversation about the general topic and see if we can’t come up with ways to help her and others who may face the same issues.

“Lucy,” we’ll call her, says that she’s been using one of the MS drugs with great success for the past several years. She’s been on her father’s insurance and just found out that she’ll be aging off next month.

Lucy cannot pay for the drugs or her doctors’ visits out of pocket and is looking for help.

Also, she has one of those relatives who is beating her up for even taking the drugs and not going with the 100 percent natural method of dealing with her multiple sclerosis. The relative says she know loads of people who have “cured” their MS with diet and acupuncture.

Haven’t we all heard that “I know someone who cured their MS with…” rubbish before?

This community is a cache of knowledge and experience and I know for a fact that many of us have dealt with some of the issues that Lucy is staring down right now. I also believe that there are people who face the challenges of losing coverage, having to stop therapies due to finances, spacing out injections to make prescriptions last longer, dealing with the faith healers, etc… every day.

We’ve patted ourselves on the back for what a great community we are, praised one another for our pluck in the face of MS, and taken what we need from the Life with MS Blog and from one another for over five years. Here’s a chance for all of you who may have faced such circumstance and figured a way around, under, over or through to get to the place you are today.

Let’s dig into our collective bag of hard-fought resourcefulness and see if we can’t give Lucy and others looking at a bleak tomorrow some answers, shall we?

I believe that is one of the greatnesses of this community. We know, we care, we share!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trevis Gleason

Trevis L. Gleason is a food journalist and published author, an award-winning chef and culinary instructor who has taught at institutions such as Cornell University, New England Culinary Institute and...read more